Most humans are blissfully ignorant of the world around them, so busy dealing with life that they miss 99.9999999999999% of everything around them. Spending a little time peering deeper into our surroundings, you might just be pleasantly surprised at what you might find. I have shown that certain things do not exist, however finding this small slice of natural beauty does provide some relief from normal life.

Below a photo of MgSO4 crystals I made:

Recently the CEO of one of the largest IT companies decided that inter company email is to be banned. This triggered some memories I have regarding discussions with various business people I have met through the years regarding the usefulness of email in the corporate environment.

Many people I have spoken to supports the decision I mentioned in the introduction of this post. They believe that email is a huge distraction for people to work efficiently, as most email is either junk or not of such a nature that deems a response / action necessary. Those people usually recommend instant messaging or the telephone as alternatives.

I however believe IM (Instant Messaging) and the telephone are the worst evils - affecting one's performance much more adversely than email ever can. Why? Because people expect you to respond immediately when sending an IM or calling you. They expect you will stop what you were busy with and pick up the phone or respond to the IM bouncing up and down the dock. I have had people yell at me because I did not reply quickly enough on IM, even though I explained I was on the phone and busy on a remote computer session with a second client, they still insisted I should at least have acknowledged the IM message. That made me furious.

I just sold my trusty Mac Pro I had since I landed in Canada almost 4 years ago. A week ago I sold my MacBook Pro 17" I bought three months ago. I only have one tiny Mac left. This is strangely odd for me.

Register all DLLs in current folder:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Some Directory>for /f %a in ('dir /b *.dll') do regsvr32 %a

Unregister all:

One incident is a co-incidence. Two is a pattern. For the second time I dealt with a strange situation that did not seem to adhere to any predictability other than the fact that it will happen. Sometime. A Windows 2008 Server Core and now a Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise Server with Hyper-V and some virtual machines would run fine for days, then suddenly become unresponsive. The machine is up, Hyper-V VM's are inaccessible, console is locked up, can telnet to SMTP service but for the most part the system is dead. Only a hard reset helped. Until the next time.

The way I fixed the Server Core issue, and hopefully the R2 incident, is by configuring Hyper-V's network settings as follow:

• Since my servers each had two NICs, I configured one for the host OS called LAN, and the other for Hyper-V's exclusive use.
• The LAN interface is the one used to access the host itself.
• The Hyper-V interface is used exclusively for each VM.

• Ensure the "Allow management operating system to share this network adapter" setting is OFF.